Case Study: Unthinkable

Posted 27 July by Blaine Bertsch in Case Studies

Unthinkable is a multi-office, cross-border design and digital strategy company with team members scattered across North America – stretching from Alberta to Nova Scotia to New York. Unthinkable partners manage their business from afar and must work diligently to communicate.
As a managing partner of Unthinkable, Lisa Hagen also deals with developing strategy: a role that includes taking the lead on cash flow management and reporting. According to Hagen, before finding Dryrun “unfortunately, everybody just ended up being out of the loop.”

Hagen knows very well the struggles small businesses face when dealing with budgets, finance and cash flow projections. She explains that “We’re always invoicing clients and never really know when the money’s actually coming in…it’s really hard to get a handle on when the cheque is going to actually get deposited into the account and see how much money we’re going to have on hand over the next six months.”

Initially, Hagen was struggling with “a really complicated spreadsheet that was tricky to update yet needed to be shared amongst the partners to keep everyone current on the financial picture. It took up quite a bit of time and it was not very intuitive… and it wasn’t really easy to understand at a glance. So we had a lot of extra meetings so that we could talk about what was going on.” Meetings that take up precious time and are unnecessarily redundant.

How Dryrun Helped with Cash Flow

Upon discovering Dryrun, Lisa was eager to explore the ability to run scenarios, a feature that is not offered in any other cash flow app and is difficult to model in spreadsheets.

“I don’t spend a lot of time. It’s really quick to update,” says Hagen. “Any time I’m prepping an invoice or I have received new information about payments or we are booking new business, I just pop into Dryrun and update my projections in just a few minutes,” she says.

Hagen has started to use Dryrun virtually on a daily basis. She uses it to manage cash flow including tracking and updating expected payment dates, to run scenarios on key issues (such as hiring new employees) and also to model out the company’s sales forecasts.

Hagen says that Dryrun has helped Unthinkable figure out their growth plans. “It’s even great in being able to track previous projects, how well we’ve done, how quickly clients are paying, and when we’re booking a lot of work. What months does everything seem to be coming in? What are our low times and high times?”

It’s wonderful. I feel a lot more in control and it has freed up a lot of my time.

With partners located in different areas of the continent, communication about business cash flow was reduced to of emails, phone calls and passing around spreadsheets. The system was difficult to manage with no clear way to keep people up-to-date on the latest changes and updates.

Since Unthinkable has started using Dryrun, all the partners understand where their financials are at any given time. “It’s very accurate, and it’s so easy to update. I don’t know how we were functioning before. I don’t think we had a really clear idea of what was going on, says Hagen.

As Dryrun is cloud-based, cash flow tracking and scenarios are always online and in one centralized location where all partners could easily access them. “I think it also gives them a feeling of control and confidence, they can pop in at any time and see what’s going on,” Hagen says. She adds the visually appealing presentation style is a big advantage because “it’s really nice to have the graph and see everything at a glance. It was perfect.”

“It’s wonderful. I feel a lot more in control and it has freed up my time.” Through quick updates and easy sharing among the team, Hagen estimates that she saves a half a day to a full day’s worth of work every single month.

Dryrun has helped Unthinkable streamline their operations, save time, understand their business and make plans for growth.

Hagen would recommend Dryrun for businesses because “They need it to make their life so much easier. It takes away a lot of the headache and confusion,” she says.